Following the White House Correspondents' Association dinner at the weekend, one thread that the argumentative, sometimes obsessive, US political blogosphere has had difficulty shaking off is whether Stephen Colbert, the invited after-dinner comedian, was in any way funny.
Colbert - the host of The Colbert Report, a spoof rightwing current affairs show - followed on from the too-weird-for-words double-Bush segment, where a Bush impersonator stood next to the US president (you can see the picture on the front page of yesterday's newspaper) to say what George W was really thinking. When the real Bush said he was "absolutely delighted" to be at the dinner, the fake one declared that the "media really ticks me off - the way they try to embarrass me by not editing what I say".
The correspondents' dinner is a rare political fixture in that it invites the executive along for the purpose of laughing at them. But Colbert's keynote address went in harder than most, using his comic persona of a man who ostensibly supports Bush to give advice to the president, who was sat a few places to his right. He said Bush should ignore the polls that give him a 32% approval rating since they just "reflect what people are thinking in 'reality'". "Reality has a well-known liberal bias," he explained.
The press didn't do too well either. Colbert suggested the correspondents should leave Washington, go home and write "fiction" about an "intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration".
The initial response from several blogs was delight. Editor and Publisher, a trade journal, added to it when it reported that George and Laura Bush were unamused. For the bloggers at Daily Kos the comedian had, gratifyingly, used a very public stage to say what they thought on the president and the press.
But later, the question was: why had more of this failed to make it through to the US press and TV (in Britain an extract made it through to today's G2). The Huffington Post picked up on it as an example of how the US media shields Bush from bad publicity. Elsewhere, others suggested it was more that the routine could have been funnier. The New Republic's blogger began "I'm a big Stephen Colbert fan, a huge Bush detractor" before confessing Colbert had failed to make him laugh. The Republican-supporting Captain's Quarters thought Colbert "bombed"; the blogger behind Davenetics, not a Bush supporter, wrote that he "didn't really laugh, although I nodded a lot".
Collecting the views of his readers and those around the blogosphere, Andrew Sullivan suggests that funniness is not the issue - Colbert has become a popular hero "simply for sticking it to the president in public". He suggest Colbert played the role of the court jester. In any case, you can watch the video, read the transcript and judge for yourself.
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